I have a friend who works for Mercy Corps, and has taken two trips to the Middle East this year, one to Jordan and the Syrian border, and one to Gaza and Jerusalem. She has posted multiple times on Facebook about what she has seen, and what the news isn’t telling us, and she gets no response . . . crickets. So I told her to post a picture of her cats as a test, and boom: likes, comments, hearts. The problem with that scenario is that social media has so few ways to interact with the sad reality of world affairs, unless it’s a bombing that makes headlines and then disappears. Sustained awfulness (or evidence of political corruption, etc) has no appropriate outlet, and most Americans don’t want to see it, clearly.